Let’s start with a story. Daan did a traditional fast follow. He calls it Netherflix. His story was: “It’s like Netflix…for The Netherlands!”. At first, he buys rights on the cheap, pays for digital subtitling, and has a successful kickoff. He gets through to 10% household penetration, or roughly 700,000 subscribers, with an annualized gross revenue of about 60 million Euros. The strength of the Euro lets him raid the Anglosphere and he can stock 10,000 hours of content reliably [1]. He gets through the struggle of getting his stack to deliver content and minimize churn. He’s able to host and deliver 10,000 hours reliably, in spite of supporting video players across 11 different front end platforms, and the costs associated with hosting,[…]
Tag: business
A score serves as an ultimate abstraction or summary. That’s especially true in sport. “Who won?” “The Blue Jays. 11 to 5.” The Blue Jays won because they moved men more often across one specific plate more often than the other team. This is all very American. A brief period of action. Collect statistics about that brief period. ???. Profit. And it’s easy. Baseball is nice for the 1 to 1 correspondence of points to a single event. American football and basketball are spicier. Cricket, with all due respect to my antipodean friends, is ridiculous. There’s so much more to the performance of The Blue Jays or the Australian National Cricket Team. But the score is the ultimate summary. There’s[…]
Reddit had a bruising week. If you’re out of the loop, you can read about it here. It highlights the untapped opportunities in how our collective experiences are managed and lists of recommended reading/viewing are assembled. Large areas of opportunity include regression shaving, state-management, and dog-whistle cancelling headphones. Regression Shaving In general, the bigger the audience, the smaller the media. In Regression to the Meme, I argued that a lot of redditors want high jolts per minute with easy to consume content. Why read a three paragraph joke when you can get the same amount of dopamine almost immediately with a six word image macro? Larger audiences congregate around easy-to-consume content. Go wide. Go LCD. Accept that younger people have[…]
Somebody, get this, created a fitbit…but for dogs. This is a real design pattern. Take any service that is starting to gain traction and just add “for dogs!” at the end of it. Tinder…for dogs. Airbnb…for dogs. It’s a laugh line. Facebook…for dogs. Those are all real things. Dogs do love to chase tail lights. That’s just taking the taillight/fast-follow strategy a little bit too far. Entrepreneurs are trying to reinvent things by making them smarter. This is well beyond the you know, “the data!”, style pitches you may have been subjected to. I’m really optimistic, and excited, for the 2.5% of companies that will thrive, not by slapping a dashboard on an product or attacking a niche market, but by[…]
Ask some what’s the key factor for success and they’ll say team. Ask others what’s the key factor for success and they’ll say code. In many circumstances, many problems can be solved by shipping code. Revenue down? Ship! Morale down? Ship. Customer sat down? Ship. Ship. An orientation to ship and Get Shhhhhhhet Done (TM) is valued in many cultures. An orientation towards team is valued in many others. It’s not pretty when the two cultures clash. To those that want to ship, meetings with others, talk, policy, and process is viewed as communication overhead that adds little value at best, and is catastrophic at worst. They have a deadline to hit. Stop talking about your feelings and your preferred[…]